Jane Kiley Hamlin

Social anxiety (SA) negatively impacts myriad aspects of an individual’s life. Although research with adults and children highlights an important link between SA and social cognitive abilities (e.g., reasoning about others’ thoughts and emotions), findings are mixed. We hypothesized that these mixed findings stem from the various combinations of social cognitive components of SA under investigation and the different types of measures used. Understanding these relationships in middle-to-late childhood is especially important, given that it is a period of substantial social cognitive development and a common onset age for SA. Seventy-eight children (Mage = 8.15 years, SD = 1.61) and their parents completed measures capturing different components of anxiety (i.e., social worry, fear of negative evaluation, and social avoidance) and social cognition (i.e., emotion recognition, mental state understanding, and social perspective-taking). Measures of social cognition were not significantly correlated. Consistent with our expectations, associations between social cognition and social anxiety were measure-dependent. Self-reported fear of negative evaluation emerged as a positive predictor of accuracy in a behavioral measure of mental state understanding but a negative predictor of parent-reported mental state understanding. In addition, social avoidance accounted for additional variance only when predicting lower self-reported perspective-taking. Together, our findings highlight the multifaceted nature of social cognition and SA and the need for distinguishing these facets in future work. These findings are discussed in the context of measurement limitations in the current study and the related measurement challenges faced in this field.

A decade of ManyBabies research, testing thousands of babies across hundreds of labs, has shown that some, but not all findings in infant research replicate well. Collectively, these projects have shown us that our methods carry limitations that larger samples alone cannot resolve. Here we present three lessons that point toward a more reliable, inclusive developmental science.

A decade of ManyBabies research, testing thousands of babies across hundreds of labs, has shown that some, but not all findings in infant research replicate well. Collectively, these projects have shown us that our methods carry limitations that larger samples alone cannot resolve. Here we present three lessons that point toward a more reliable, inclusive developmental science. A decade of ManyBabies research, testing thousands of babies across hundreds of labs, has shown that some, but not all findings in infant research replicate well. Collectively, these projects have shown that current methods carry limitations that larger samples alone cannot resolve. Here three lessons that point toward a more reliable, inclusive developmental science are presented.

Classic theory in developmental science holds that the imitation of facial gestures is a late developing capacity in human infancy. Meltzoff and Moore (1977) reported that 12- to 21-day-old infants imitate facial and manual gestures, theorizing that young infants can recognize cross-modal correspondences between observed and performed actions and suggesting that early imitation plays a role in social learning from other people. Subsequent studies yielded mixed findings and alternative interpretations have been proposed. Thus, whether young infants can imitate adult gestures remains a debated question. As part of the ManyBabies consortium, a large-scale collaborative network in developmental science, we tested whether very young infants (14–28 and 40–54 days old) demonstrate facial imitation using a protocol that was standardized for use across multiple independent laboratories. In a within-subjects design, infants saw mouth-opening and tongue-protrusion gestures in randomized order, presented by the same experimenter at the same distance and rate; responses were videorecorded for later behavioral scoring. [Insert study results and interpretations here.]

Thomas suggests that evidence suggestive of an innate moral core can instead be explained by relationship inferences and evaluations. We argue that the analogy between other demonstrations of prosociality (e.g., helping) and imitation is insufficient, and additionally highlight key findings that appear inconsistent with a relationship-centric view of infants’ sociomoral capacities.

Social anxiety (SA) negatively impacts myriad aspects of an individual’s life. Although research with adults and children highlights an important link between SA and social-cognitive abilities (e.g., reasoning about others’ thoughts and emotions), findings are mixed. We hypothesized that these mixed findings stem from the various combinations of social-cognitive components of SA under investigation and the different types of measures used. Understanding these relationships in middle to late childhood is especially important, given that it is a period of substantial social-cognitive development and a common onset age for SA. Seventy-eight children (Mage=8.15 years, SD=1.61) and their parents completed measures capturing different components of anxiety (i.e., social worry, fear of negative evaluation, and social avoidance) and social cognition (i.e. emotion recognition, mental state understanding, and social perspective taking). Contrary to our expectations, measures of social cognition were only weakly correlated. Consistent with our expectations, associations between social cognition and social anxiety were measure-dependent. Self-reported fear of negative evaluation emerged as a positive predictor of accuracy in a behavioral measure of mental state understanding but a negative predictor of parent-reported mental state understanding. In addition, social avoidance accounted for additional variance only when predicting lower self-reported perspective-taking. Together, our findings underscore the multifaceted nature of social cognition and SA and highlight the need for distinguishing these facets in future work.

Though a wealth of research has found that young infants have the capacity to evaluate helping and hindering agents (e.g. Hamlin, 2007; for a review, see Woo et al., 2025), it is nevertheless unclear whether these evaluations reflect mere social evaluations or more mature understanding of moral concepts. The present experiments probed the nature of infants’ evaluations by testing whether they associate the morally-relevant words “good” and “bad” with helpers and hinderers. In Exp.1, 32 19-month-olds watched a live puppet show where a protagonist puppet is either helped or hindered by another puppet (ball show, adapted from Hamlin & Wynn, 2011). Then, the infant was presented with the helper and hinderer puppets, and asked, “can you point to the good/bad guy?”. Results revealed that whereas infants reliably mapped “bad” to the hinderer (24/31, p = .003), they showed relatively inconsistent mapping of the word “good” to the helper (p = .09). In Exp.2, 42 20-month-olds watched a video recording of the ball show, then engaged in a preferential looking paradigm in which still images of the helper and hinderer were shown on the screen. An audio prompt then asked, “Where’s the good/bad guy? Find the good/bad guy,” while an eye-tracker monitored infants’ gaze. Results paralleled and bolstered that of Exp.1: infants looked significantly longer at the hinderer when hearing the “bad” prompt, but looked equally at both characters when hearing the “good” prompt. Together, these findings suggest that infants may associate the abstract moral word “bad” with hindering behaviour prior to the second birthday, but the association between “good” and helping behaviour may emerge later. This asymmetry provides further evidence for a negativity bias in social cognition.

Do toddlers and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind? This multi-lab collaboration examined whether 18- to 27-month-olds’ and adults’ anticipatory looks distinguish between two basic forms of epistemic states: knowledge and ignorance. In adults (n = 703, 68% female), we found clear evidence that they do: they showed simple goal-based action anticipation and differentiated between knowledge and ignorance conditions. In toddlers (n = 521, 49% female), results were less conclusive. While demonstrating goal-based action anticipation, they did not differentiate between knowledge and ignorance as predicted. Future research can explore adults’ sensitivity to more complex epistemic states like true/false beliefs and clarify whether toddlers’ results reflect competence or performance limitations.

Humans routinely share valuable resources, even at significant personal cost (e.g., organ donation). What motivates such generosity? This study examined the emotional benefits of sharing in toddlers with the largest and youngest sample to date ( N = 134; M _age = 20.50 months, range = 16.57–23.77 months). Replicating prior studies, toddlers displayed greater happiness after giving than receiving. Extending these findings, we demonstrate that sharing resources provided by an experimenter elicited greater happiness than observing the experimenter share, suggesting that actively performing prosocial acts leads to greater reward. Crucially, we ruled out alternative explanations by demonstrating that the emotional benefits of sharing are not attributable in this study to emotional contagion (toddlers’ happiness was unrelated to recipient's enthusiasm) or following an experimenter's instructions (toddlers were happier giving to others than to themselves). These findings provide evidence that sharing is intrinsically rewarding from shortly after it first emerges, which may serve as a proximate mechanism driving cooperation across societies. Summary: We provide evidence that sharing is intrinsically rewarding soon after this behavior emerges in ontogeny. Toddlers displayed greater happiness after giving than receiving, and actively sharing resources led to more happiness than merely observing sharing. Giving to others elicited more happiness than giving to oneself, suggesting that sharing is emotionally rewarding due to its prosocial nature.

Recognizing that certain acts are communicative is a key requirement of the development of communicative skills. Newborn infants have been shown to selectively respond to certain ostensive cues, including mutual gaze and infant directed speech, supporting theories of the evolution of ostensive‐inferential communication. That said, no study has yet examined newborns’ responses to pointing gestures, nor whether these responses are sensitive to pointing as an ostensive cue. The current study investigates whether a sensitivity to pointing is present in 5‐day‐old newborns by comparing newborns’ attention to a pointing hand versus a fist via a preferential looking paradigm. Across 4 Experiments with 5 conditions (N = 90), we manipulated several key factors in the communicative nature of pointing: (a) the presence versus absence of a referred‐to target (Experiment 1), (b) whether the pointing entity was social versus non‐social (Experiment 3), and (c) whether or not the point referred to a target by moving toward versus away from it (Experiment 4). Newborns in Experiment 1 looked longer at a pointing human hand than a non‐pointing fist, but only in the presence of a target object; attention to a target‐directed point was replicated in Experiment 2. In contrast, newborns in Experiments 3 and 4 showed no visual preference for an arrow over a disc when each moved toward a target, nor for a point over a fist when each moved away from a target. Together, these results are the first to suggest that newborn infants are sensitive to a key communicative gesture, pointing, and that their responses are specific to points that are both social (i.e., human hands) and communicative (i.e., referential). These findings support the existence of an experience‐independent sensitivity to pointing as an ostensive signal, consistent with theories of the evolution of ostensive‐inferential communication.